Perhaps there are some out there who think 4 minutes of raging electric guitar isn’t enough, so I spent the afternoon today making a video release of the full nearly 9 minutes of my 2026 Jimi Hendrix Memorial piece. Here also are a couple follow-ups after that longish post last night.

I wrote yesterday that Eric Burdon might have recorded his answer song “Yes, I Am Experienced”  before the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut LP and its title song “Are You Experienced?”  were released. I should have double checked that unlikely event, because that’s highly unlikely. Both groups, the Experience and The New Animals were forming and recording around the beginning of 1967, but Are You Experienced  was released in the Spring and the New Animals’ “Winds of Change”  album with the song I borrowed some words from was put out in Autumn.

Let me say a few more words about the New Animals’ LP though. Regardless of its unalloyed embrace of 1967 hippie ethos and the plausible charges of over-reach by Burdon as a wordsmith, it is a unique mix of spoken/chanted word with full-throated singing by the acclaimed singer. The new band was talented. It was produced by one Tom Wilson, the incredible Afro-American producer who had worked with Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, The Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Soft Machine, and the Velvet Underground.*   Besides the song I borrowed some remembered words from yesterday, the LP’s title song chants the praises of a number of other historic and contemporary musicians. There’s a strongly sung expansion of the Rolling Stones “Paint It Black,”  and the witty (and Top-40 charting) song lauding Burdon’s new hometown of San Francisco. The spoken word highlight for me is “The Black Plague”  a Poe-worthy tale of class paranoia and separation.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Burdon is  audacious to pretentious. That’s part of what I love about him and this album, and I’m probably guilty of every sin he can be charged with, without the grace of being able to sing as well as he can. I was trying to describe how odd it is to my wife today by saying that the well-known LP it’s most like in its oddness is the Patti Smith Group’s debut Horses.  With “Paint It Black” it’s got its boldly recast cover song ala Smith’s “Gloria.”  Like Horses “Elegie”  and “Break It Up”  it has its Hendrix related and praise-for-departed-inspirational-artists songs. Weird tales? Smith “Birdland”  has its considerable incantatory power, but the tale of Burdon’s “Black Plague”  increments in it’s stately telling. Both band’s frontperson is comfortable slipping between spoken word and singing. And, of course, Horses  isn’t for everyone either. AFAIK, Patti Smith has never spoken about any fondness for Burdon, but it wouldn’t surprise me that Lenny Kaye might have had some appreciation for the Animals, New or otherwise.

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Much of the work in making the video came from finding and appropriating the photos of Hendrix and the New Animals I put in it. Most of the places I found them didn’t credit the photographers –and they should be credited. I increasingly feel bad about not doing that for videos. Luckily for my conscience, I have access to a couple of stock photo and video clip libraries as benefits to two programs I use, but their off-the-rack blandness can be unsatisfying too, although I worked to spice them up with some composting tricks in this one.

At one point I thought ethical AI might be a way out. I used Adobe’s Firefly product during its beta stage, which claimed to be trained only on work they had licensed. I even used it extensively for one of my Hendrix memorials a couple years ago. But there are more issues with AI than just training sources, and the stuff still produces mostly horseshoes and hand-grenades approximates. I like the additional audience that videos can bring, but these things keep me concentrating more on recordings.

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*There a movie, documentary, book, something that should be made about Tom Wilson. What’s been tried at article length hasn’t found many sources, and death has claimed most of the artists he worked with. Maybe the best that could be done is a novel or roman à clef film imaging what his life must have been like for him